This Week in Fiction: Nathan Englander

Nathan Englander is the author of this week's story, “Free Fruit for Young Widows.” He recently exchanged e-mails with fiction editor Cressida Leyshon.

_In this week’s story, an Israeli shopkeeper tells his son Etgar the tale of Professor Tendler, an old Army comrade who saved his life during the Sinai Campaign of 1956. When did you first start thinking about Tendler’s story?_I will pretty much get on a plane to anywhere in the world if it’s to do an event with the Israeli writer Etgar Keret (and, yes, the little boy in the story is named after him). So about a year and a half ago, I flew to Rome to give a talk with Etgar, and, a nice surprise, there in the first row of the audience was an Italian friend of mine. After the talk, we ended up on the roof of her building telling stories for hours. One of those stories was about Etgar’s father, and matching uniforms, and the Sinai Campaign. I really never (at least until now) write stories about things overheard, or based on stories related to me, it’s just not how I work. And I don’t think I’d have dared to write this one if not for the confusion caused when you mix American over-politeness with Israeli straight-talk. I wanted to tell Etgar something about the narrative structure of the story. But I didn’t want to be rude and talk about a personal story in an inconsiderate way. So I asked, in Hebrew, “Would you mind if I engaged with that story as a story?” And Etgar turned and said, “Sure. Take it.” As in, It’s yours, go write it. And there I was backpedalling and apologizing and saying, No, no, that wasn’t my intent. But Etgar made it clear. He writes about talking fish, and fake angels, and women that turn into hairy men after dark, and that, really, this is not the kind of thing he would do. So a year went by, and I was living in Berlin for a few months, and thinking about history and the Holocaust and Israel, and that’s when I sat down to write "Free Fruit."

_Why did you decide that the account of his experiences at the end of the Second World War should be told to a boy on the cusp of manhood?_As soon as a story is completed, certain elements of its construction become almost foreign to me. Though I feel permanently connected to a finished story in countless ways, there’s always a sort of immediate recognition that the piece was generated in a specific time and a specific place and could never have been written by me, as it was, at any other time—not in the past, or the future. It could only ever have been written right then. How is this an answer to your question? Well, I look at the structure of this story—a fractured narrative, a father recounting a story to his son by their produce stand as the boy matures—and I can’t for the life of me imagine why I imagined it that way. I really have no idea, except that now it seems to me to be this story’s proper form.

_You lived in Israel for several years in the nineteen-nineties. What’s it like for you now to set a story there? Does writing about Jerusalem make you feel nostalgic for the time you spent in the city?_I do feel more and more nostalgic for Jerusalem as time goes by, and, yes, writing about the city increases that longing. I’ve been living in New York again for almost ten years, and only now do I feel like I have enough distance to write about Jerusalem, or, at least, to write about Jerusalem as Jerusalem.

_Your novel “The Ministry of Special Cases,” which was published in 2007, is about a Jewish family in Buenos Aires whose lives are ripped apart when the military junta comes to power in 1976. Why did you want to write about Argentina during that period?_

There are about a million reasons I was drawn to write about that place and time. But one of those reasons very much relates to your previous question. I was living in Jerusalem. And I’d moved there to make peace, to be part of the new Jerusalem, this open peaceful city in this open peaceful region … and it’s not even worth continuing with what sounds like a utopian fantasy, now that things have gone so terribly awry. But at that time, there was going to be a two-state solution, and a real peace, and a bright future, or so some of us believed. (And I still kind of believe it, even if I know to pretend to be outwardly pessimistic.) Anyway, I very much fell in love with Jerusalem. And I was very much dedicated to that city. And watching it come apart during those years—watching the peace process crumble, and our neighborhood blowing up, and all the senseless violence, and incompetent leadership on both sides (or the myriad sides), I just (unconsciously, but I see it now in retrospect) became obsessed with cities that turn on their fiercely dedicated and loyal residents again and again. When writing, I think one looks to tell the most pressurized version of any story. And focussing on that element (and again, this is not a conscious decision, it’s only clear to me in retrospect) Buenos Aires, and especially Buenos Aires during the period of the Dirty War, was one of the extreme cases of a city with just endless potential for greatness, where politics violently and repeatedly invades the lives of its residents.

_You were living in Berlin last year. Is the city—and its citizens—a place you can imagine recreating in fiction and making your own?_Absolutely. I mean, I think this story is already born out of that period, as I spent a lot of time pondering the city’s dark history. But I don’t mean to insinuate that that’s all I did (that I spent all my time in a drafty library, chin up, and staring out ponderously at a gray Lake Wannsee like I was living in an Edward Gorey cartoon—though I did do that a lot). What I’m saying is, I worked crazy hard while I was in Berlin, but stole every second I could to see the city. And maybe it’s that contrast that made those months so fruitful for me. There I was, just enamored with this fantastic, vibrant, wonderful city, and never not conscious of its violent past, of the history of every street and stone.

You’re currently working on a stage adaptation of your short story, “The Twenty-seventh Man,” which appeared in your collection “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” in 1999. It’s about an unpublished writer in Stalinist Russia who is rounded up in error and imprisoned alongside twenty-six eminent writers. What’s it been like to revisit a story you wrote more than a decade ago and re-imagine it for the stage?

I think I actually needed that decade to pass before I could look at the story anew. I’ve owed the play for about that long. Right after the first book came out, Nora Ephron asked me to adapt it into a play. I call it the Rip Van Winkle agreement. I said, “Sure, I’ll write it just as soon as I finish my novel.” And then a quick eight-or-nine years later, I resurfaced. Thankfully, thankfully, patient person that she is, Nora was still there waiting. And, I have to admit, I was wildly nervous about revisiting the story. That is, if a friend told me she was adapting some previous work, I’d think, Great, good for you! How exciting! But at the beginning all I could think about is Corky St. Clair showing off his “Remains of the Day” lunchbox at the end of “Waiting for Guffman.” I just pictured myself doing "Twenty-seventh Man: the Shadow-Puppets," and "Twenty-seventh Man: the Interpretive Dance." And I know why I felt that, or feared that, because the first draft of the play was what I call “a story in dialog”—very much not a play, but a story re-formatted. Then I was given a very clear, very intense, very compressed education in the rules of drama. And I am hyper-aware of my good-fortune, and know that my first experience drafting a play should have been at the Learning Annex with the assignment to create a scene from real life, instead of finding myself under the tutelage of the brilliant Ms. Ephron. Basically, I wrote and rewrote and rewrote again, drafting and drafting for Nora until the play itself, though adhering to the narrative of the story, became its own work whose loyalty is to the rules of drama, though its roots are in story. Even in my head, the play and the story are now wholly unrelated works.

_Did you turn to the work of any other dramatists as a guide?_I knew nothing about theatre when I started this. So I started reading plays, eating plays, devouring them. And then when I thought I had it down, I told Nora, proudly, how many plays I’d read. She said something like, “You know, they’re meant to be seen.” And I said something like, “Gotcha boss!” and then started going to the theatre (I’ve probably been to ten shows this month alone, including seeing ‘American Idiot’ twice). So, I cannot even tell you how many different plays and productions I have bouncing around in my head. And having had a yeshiva education with, let us say, some holes in it, this is the first time I’d even read things like “Death of a Salesman,” and “The Glass Menagerie.” I found myself amazed by how deceptively simple those classics were in their construction, and then how powerfully they hit in the end. As for direct connections with dramatists, the play was sent to the estimable Oskar Eustis at the Public Theater, who gave me magnificent notes for a rewrite, and he paired me up with Barry Edelstein, the head of the Public’s Shakespeare Initiative. Barry directed the reading we had of the play (with the hugely talented Pablo Schreiber reading the main role). Every time I think I’ve taken the play as far as it can possibly go, when I think there’s no more in me, no more in it, Barry pushes me further. Now I’m fully smitten with the theatre, and secretly writing another play, and simply feeling excited about writing in general. It’s like I’m just starting to write, right now, today. I’m not sure what the future of the play is, in fact I’m so happily ignorant about what’s going on that I really can’t even tell you what stage it’s at, but whatever happens, I can’t be any more thankful for this year spent writing it. It’s been exhilarating.

You’ve written fiction about some of the most devastating periods of twentieth-century history, including the Holocaust in this story and others. Do you ever feel a burden of responsibility toward the historical truth?

You’re asking one question, but I think I’m hearing another. I sort of hear it as, “What’s wrong with you?” That is, why do I write about these things, why do I focus on these dark periods? I suffer over that question. I think I try and resist writing about these periods. And if I hadn’t been living in Berlin, I really might not have let myself start a second Holocaust-linked story while busy writing a play set in Stalinist Russia—except that it became clear to me there, if this is how my head works, this is how my head works. It was actually a hugely freeing realization to arrive at. As for responsibility toward historical truth, I feel a huge responsibility. I do massive amounts of research and feel a deep obligation toward accuracy. But it’s a controlled accuracy. We’re talking about fiction here, about creating new kinds of truth. I believe that anything that a story needs to be true is true by virtue of its necessity. If it’s not essential, then it may not be changed. But you need to have the facts to make those decisions. If a character jumps off a building, you need to understand gravity, and the limits of the human body, rate of falling, and all that, and then you can decide if you want him to fly. In this story, I can’t even tell you the number of things that I looked at or looked up, finally testing them on my devil’s-advocate friend Joel in Jerusalem, arguing the theoretical through. Then when it’s time for a big decision, I’m ready to stand behind it. So if a reader wants to write in and say, “There’s no way that an Egyptian soldier ever accidentally sat down with an Israeli soldier because they were wearing identical French-supplied uniforms,” I’d feel comfortable responding, “That may generally be true, but it definitely happened once—because it happened to Shimmy Gezer. It says so right there in paragraph two.”

(Photograph: Elena Seibert)

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